César Guerra-Peixe: modernity looking for a tradition

• Grant number: 09/00407-8
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: May 01, 2009
• End date: February 28, 2013
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Sociology - Other specific Sociologies
• Principal Investigator: Leopoldo Garcia Pinto Waizbort
• Grantee: Frederico Machado de Barros
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This project's more general goal is investigating the relations between the so-called modernization processes in Brazil and some of its cultural and social traditions. To achieve this, César Guerra-Peixe's (1914-1993) work will be taken as a starting point, since his personal and artistic trajectories seem to have been specially marked by some of the more significant tensions and questions of the period. Aiming to establish a "Brazilian" language for concert music that was in phase with the social and cultural realities of his time, Guerra-Peixe abandoned twelve-tone music - which at the time meant musical avant-garde in Brazil -, in order to adopt nationalist conceptions.This project intends to place this search for a Brazilian language for concert music in the wider perspective of the modernization processes that took force from the turn of XIXth to XXth century on and that were intimately linked to a series of changes by which the Western societies have been through since then. In relation to arts, these processes had great importance for the search for new aesthetic pathways aiming at the creation of a music that corresponded to its own time.By knowing Guerra-Peixe's choices and positions before these dilemmas - his avant-gardist period and his later turn to nationalism - and thinking of them with regard to the more general frame of Brazilian society and artistic tendencies of the time, this project seeks to give as well a contribution to the field of Sociology of Art by studying the relations between music and society in mid-twentieth-century Brazil.

Academic Publications

(References retrieved automatically from State of São Paulo Research Institutions)

BARROS, Frederico Machado de. César Guerra-Peixe: modernity in search of a tradition. 2013. Doctoral Thesis - Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD) São Paulo.